Compassionate, imaginative and accurate- brilliantly done.
- Sunday Times

I do not think I have ever been so moved by a modern novel... It has made me take stock of my own position.
- Dennis Potter

Synopsis:

When railway signalman Harry Price suffers a stroke his son Matthew, a lecturer in London, makes a return to the border village of Glynmawr. As Matthew and Harry struggle with their memories of social and personal change, a beautiful and moving portrait of the love between a father and son emerges.

About the author:

Raymond Williams was born in 1921 in the Welsh border village of Pandy. He taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, and in 1974 was appointed as Professor of Drama at Cambridge. His best-known publications include; Culture and Society (1958), The Long Revolution (1961), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords (1976) and Marxism and Literature (1977).

Short extract:

I first read Border Country when it appeared as a Penguin paperback in 1964. Its author was familiar to me for his pathbreaking critical studies Culture and Society (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961), but an undergraduate from the Rhondda at Oxford did not buy hardback novels, and I had only been made aware of the existence of Raymond Williams’ 1960 novel from biographical blurbs. I shelled out my five shillings and took it home. For me it crackled with the excitement of a discovery I had somehow known all along. I did not stop reading until, some time the next day, it was finished, and I have never stopped rereading that original copy since.

Buy:

Buy Border Country from the Parthian online bookstore for £8.99